Monday, 25 February 2013

Malifaux on a Budget - Horde Crews

So we know by now I'm sure that I love Malifaux, one of the things I love most is how accessible it is to all new players because of its relatively low cost compared to most miniatures games. However I know not everyone has a huge budget which is why I began these articles, not as a way of telling people what to buy because it will win, but because its a good option for the price.

There are some crews (as a few have pointed out in emails) I have left suspiciously alone. This is because some crews are going to be more expensive to start. Many of the ressurectionist crews and a few others summon new models mid game or change a model within the game (such as Lilith). I have devoted a lot of time to working out how to choose cheaper models to make these crews work or work out the minimal models required to make it at least feasible for a new player to start the crew (such as my Kirai suggestions).
In the end I have come to the conclusion that some crews just need a lot of models to work in the way they're intended so the next few MOAB will be looking at alternate models to use in horde crews to lessen the cost.

Now I must mention before I begin that I still believe the official wyrd miniatures look better than most of the alternatives and obviously come with the rules cards but with so many resources for fan made cards (see Ratty's page in the side link) it is possible to make cards for alternate models.

This week we'll be looking at one of my favourite masters, Nicodem,
and how I made my horde of undead for less money but still in the style
of Malifaux.

Nicodem's box is one of the cheapest crew boxes and comes with a great back bone for a crew. Mortimer allows Nicodem to gain more corpse counters and it not to shabby in a fight. It also contains 3 Samurai punk zombies, which with paired weapons and cb7 all for 5ss are for my money the best combat troops in the game.
Nicodem's main ability however (like many ressurectionists) is the summoning of more undead, which he does better than any other master as for a (0) action he can summon as many mindless undead as you have corpse counters within 10". Now you may notice no mindless undead come in the box.

Now it'll cost you £9
for three of these, which isn't too expensive, but when you consider
that in a standard game I usually end up with 8 or so running around the
costs mount up very quickly.

This is my Nicodem crew, and at the side (left) you can see my mindless zombies. I have the three wyrd zombies but when I found I needed more I used Mantic games ghouls box. Now its about £12 for twenty of these and they look suitably Malifuax-y anyway but I added Wyrd's hats and guns sprue to tie them in a little better. There are of course hundreds of plastic undead kits for a similar price so choose the one appropriate for you.

Now this together will give you a pretty solid 25 SS crew with mindless undead to summon, they joy of Nicodem is that once you have your Mindless undead you can add ANY undead models and Nicodem can buff them and as long as their not spirits re summon them!

Malifaux's habit of only doing things in multiples of three is only a real issue with the summoning Masters or for those people who want to 'spam' a cheap model.

Some examples that spring to mind as issues are the Mindless zombies you mentioned, Death Marshals, Witchling Stalkers (which admittedly is a summoning issue as well), Rotten Belles (I ended one game with seven Belles and three Dead Doxies) and possibly some of the models currently only available in the new all plastic box sets.